Central Point woman stuck with a citation for poster campaign

Participating in an international campaign against genocide and other crimes in Uganda has a Central Point woman facing a crime or two of her own.

By Buffy Pollock

Participating in an international campaign against genocide and other crimes in Uganda has a Central Point woman facing a crime or two of her own.

Days after she spent the afternoon of April 20 posting red fliers around Central Point for the KONY 2012 campaign (www.kony2012.com), Lori Livingston was greeted by a knock on her door.

A city police officer was standing there and informed her that she was being cited for third-degree criminal mischief for posting the fliers.

"I felt really good about putting up all these posters, and a cop showed up and basically cited me for criminal mischief, like I had committed some crime," Livingston said.

She said she thought the fliers she posted would be treated the same as signs for yard sales and lost pets that are common around town.

"The cop told me that I was a grown woman and I should have known better."

The fliers were part of a campaign to raise awareness about war crimes committed by Lord's Resistance Army leader Joseph Kony in Uganda and to call for justice for his victims.

While police had no issues with the Kony campaign, Central Point police Capt. Chuck Newell said Livingston had broken city and state law by posting the fliers.

Posting campaign fliers, or yard-sale signs for that matter, are against city code. Creating a disturbance or damaging property, however, is against state law.

Newell said Livingston met her goal of blanketing the town in red paper, and did so using a glue substance that damaged some surfaces.

"She put them on absolutely everything — stop signs, buildings, windows, poles, newspaper stands, even on a Central Point Police sign that tells where the police station is," Newell said.

"And whatever glue she used, when the posters came down, you could still see where they were. Even more than that, it caused damage to people's houses and property. When they were taken down, some of them took paint with them. The glue she used was really like some bionic substance."

Livingston disagreed with police department accounts of her campaign.

She said she wasn't the only KONY 2012 campaigner who posted fliers around town and that her "glue" was a mixture of flour and water that "rinses right off."

"I got permission before posting the fliers, and if a business owner didn't like it and wanted to go out and pull it down, versus waiting until (Saturday) when I planned to take them down, they come right off."

Newell said volunteers removed a 9- to 10-inch-thick stack of fliers from around town.

Livingston's case is scheduled to be heard May 23 in Jackson County Circuit Court in Medford.

Livingston said she planned to clean up and remove all Kony posters Saturday and was hoping to avoid a citation in court.

Newell said the city would like to see her convicted of multiple criminal mischief violations. But Livingston, who owns DNL Business Consulting in Central Point, said she was only trying to use her freedom of speech to educate the public.

"I've been paying attention to the Kony campaign for the past six months or so, and I'm really interested in things that will get young people up off their butts to go get involved," she said.

"Some people got mad about a few posters that would make them maybe think, or even go Google to find out about Kony or what's going on in Uganda, but they spend plenty of time to figure out what TV show to watch, what kind of car to buy or what Chinese restaurant to go to. It's just really sad."

Buffy Pollock is a freelance reporter living in Medford. Email her at buffyp76@yahoo.com.